All of the Zend_View_Helper_? in respect to disabling needs to be addressed. The overall scheme seems to want to disable based on seeing the attribs['disable'] key while disregarding any corresponding value. This is an issue if you disable all the elements in a form and then later wish to enable an individual element. Also, Zend_View_Helper_FormElement has some disable code in _getInfo that seems to complicate things unnecessarily.